Rating: 
Summary: Not a masterpiece
Review: This movie is bland. I think it's the only film I've watched in awhile that has failed to touch me in anyway be it positive or negative. None of the characters were interesting, and many were one dimensional. Symbolism is everywhere, Christmas trees, visual and verbal references to rainbows, etc. There are plenty of movies out there that are worse than this one, but that doesn't make this a masterpiece. Most of film score was fine except for the somber piano piece which is distracting and takes you out of the action. I'm a big David Lynch, Cronenberg fan, and I can say this movie doesn't rival their best works as one reviewer claimed. I have a general understanding of what this movie is about and can honestly say it isn't very good.
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Summary: Kubrick will always be the best!!
Review: This is a great movie. But all of Kubricks movies are great, like Paths of Glory and Dr. Strangelove. A must se movie for a movie buffs how watches real movies like drama and thriller.
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Summary: WHY SO MANY PEOPLE THINK THIS MOVIE IS UNINTERESTING?
Review: I went to see this movie with my sister and at the very end she told me that she would be better not seeing it. Well, even I didn't like it right away, and look that i'm a die hard Kubrick fan, but I think now a bit different and I would like to share this thought about it./ There are many plots in this film, like in every Kubrick film, and at first you're supposed to take the fidelity theme of the film but, with sure, there are other sub plots. Take Full Metal Jacket, for instance, wich was about war but had also the Jungian discussion about Colective Unconcious where the character, Joker, has his individual personality smashed by his war persona, "is that you John Waine or is this ME?"./ Jan Harlan told in a recent interview that to understand Kubrick films you can't watch them apart but as a whole pack./ Well, let's go back to EWS, I think if you take the Jungian discussion in FMJ it will serve here alright. 'Cos the fidelity of the Harford couple is also a confrontation of their social archetypes with their unconcious personal desires./ I won't be long here anymore with this psycological plot but I hope it can give some clue to help other people digging this film out.
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Summary: The most misunderstood film of the decade
Review: This movie has been widely hated, even in circles where Kubrick is usually revered. One Salon reviewer even argued that _Eyes Wide Shut_ was a preachy, dogmatic monogamist tract, on the shallow basis that something bad happens to every character that seeks extramarital sex. I couldn't disagree more. The film's final lines suggest both that dreams can be equally as significant as reality, and that a single experience can never define an entire life. Kubrick seems to be saying that a single act of unfaithfulness, whether real or dreamt, does not have to undermine a relationship. Commitment, then, is not a set of arbitrary rules and agreements restricting your partner's sex life, as the Tom Cruise character at first seems to think. This unrealistic, fairy-tale view of his marriage is shattered, plunging him into a surreal, paranoid world of conspiracy and intrigue. By the end, however, he has realized (as his wife already has) that commitment is something renewed from day to day. The film thus points out the dynamic quality of something often considered to be static and constricting, i.e. a marriage, and celebrates commitment without demanding an unrealizable, perfect faithfulness.Despite many critics' assertions to the contrary, _Eyes Wide Shut_ seems to me to be quintessentially Kubrick in its surrealism, its strong use of color (vibrant reds and purples predominate), and its sophisticated theme. An attentive viewer (unlike the majority of American critics) will see that there is much more to this film than a little supposedly explicit sex. Extra props for Kubrick's ability to create a mood that is magical, erotic, and deeply paranoid -- an achievement that rivals David Lynch's best work.
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Summary: Kubrick's final and frankly baffling last breath
Review: Critics (and everyone is a critic) will always be split on Kubrick, but this last one takes the cake. Eyes Wide Shut is the apex of the latter half of Kubrick's career, following the Shining and Full Metal Jacket; each film becomes more and more divisive. Yet, there is something strangely compelling in each of these perplexing, often disturbing, films. The actual plot of the movie, and the novel it was based on, is arguable so far as relevence: Freud's stranglehold on Psychology has long since diminished completely, and the Freudian aspects of Eyes Wide Shut seem worn out: it might have been better 60 years ago. Still, the pyschosexual exploration is a completely new, almost humanistic approach for Kubrick, and (dare I say it) I'm glad he chose this film. For the first time, I find myself searching for the mental motives behind the actions of the characters: hitherto, these qualities of characters in most of Kubrick's films, particularly the latter ones, were played down to display a darker, almost naturally carnal side. This time we see the character himself lost, alien to his own actions and emotions, yet searching for an outlet of his inexplicable desires just the same. The darker side is evident, though the characters seems as puzzled by it as the audience. Like all of Kubrick's films, it is visually stunning. The color selection contrasts elegance with tawdriness, filth and decadence go hand-in-hand. The soundtrack is pulled from a variety of sources: it is less modern than the Pederecki/Bartok dissonance that worked so well for the Shining. This time it is more polarizing: things like Mozart's Requiem can be heard next to popular rock music, all drawn together with eerie and curiously repetitive piano themes. Its almost Eliotesque in its mixing of contemporaniety and antiquity. The film comes together much as a dreamscape: remarkably well-shot and edited. The acting is questionable: Kidman and Cruise may have been regrettable choices, though I think it was necessary to pair an actual married couple for the part. Kubrick's directing missed marks, and the miscasting makes these mistakes seem even more naked. Kidman is at her absolute worst: almost unwatchable in some scenes -- a few which seem to take hours because of her slow and incoherently intoxicated babbling. Cruise was a little better, and this is probably one of his greater roles, though I don't know how much that speaks for the acting. I think the film will grow with time. On first viewing, it leaves its audience very much confused: its long, extraordinarily normal and points and surreal at others, the plot seems to take incomplete directions, leaves many questions, and the resolution seems unsatisfying. Still, it comes together better each time it is seen. Regardless of its flaws, it is definitely a grandiose piece of film art, and a must-see.
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Summary: Editor! Help!
Review: Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 2000) The good news is: it's not as absolutely downright awful as everyone said it was. The bad news is: large parts of it are. This is one of those prime examples of a two and a half hour film that begged to be about an hour less. The first hour of the film, including the infamous "orgy" scene (which is, for the record, about as erotic as a week-old scrod), is all setup for Tom Cruise's bumbling attempt at mystery-solving in the second half. As such, the first hour is slow and could have been summarized in a sixth the time without us losing anything (Kubrick could have dropped the insanely out-of-date moralizing in the first hour, which would have freed us from the film's unbearable last scene as well). Then we could have gotten focused on the second hour, where Cruise becomes obsessed with figuring out exactly who it is, and why, that wants him to stop asking questions about what he discovered in part one. This is good film, here. Take a guy who's not used to figuring out mysteries and throw him in the middle of one to see what he does. It's a time-tested plot, and it usually comes off well. It does here, too, and in the second hour of this film Cruise turns in his best screen footage since The Firm (surprise, surprise). Then we come to the last scene... and the whole thing falls apart. One would expect Kidman and Cruise to have at least SOME chemistry, them having been married and all, but the whole last scene sounds more like a first-time staged reading than a final film. Not bad, but requires liberal use of the fast-forward button. **
Rating:
Summary: Powerful, moral fairy tale for grownups
Review: I just love the barrage of criticism which issued forth when this movie came out. Some fundamentalists and radical feminists called Kubrick every name in the book over one aspect of the film - the overt displays of sex. What those people are missing, however, is that *Eyes Wide Shut* is one of the most powerful, unflinching, and lyrical arguments FOR marital fidelity and chastity to grace the Big Screen since the exploitative "anything-goes" moral havoc of the Sixties. I see it as an attempt to explore and conquer those ugly twin demons, Jealousy and Decadence. This movie is not for children. I wouldn't let a child or teenager within a country mile of it. It's also not for "adults" whose intellectual prowess and depth of emotion stop at waist-level. However, for adults with properly formed consciences who can see the sex and nudity in the movie for what it is (a most visceral depiction - and implicit condemnation - of Euro-American decadence and the bitter fruit of the absence of an objective moral standard) *Eyes Wide Shut* is a thunderously beautiful and complex morality tale. Under these conditions, I would highly recommend this film.
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Summary: SEX as a paradox
Review: Eyes Wide Shut presents a married couple on the adult discovery of the true nature of sexual paradox. Sex, as presented in most films or media, is shown to be: a commodity that can be bought, a taken for granted romantic bell and whistle, a spiritual plateau, or a pure fact of biological life. Yet when the character of BILL hears his wife ALICE confess an extremely intimate sexual fantasy about another man, his preconceived ideas about sex (as mentioned above) are destroyd. First, the romantic and faithful sex between husband and wife are shattered, then the biological fuction of life (in the old man's death scene) is weirded out when the grieving daughter hits on Bill, then the notion of prostitution is undermined and yields HIV, then sex as spiritual is revealed in a cult setting with dire consequences for Mandy, Bill, Alice, and all concerned. Sex is pleasure and it is death. It is not any one thing and it is certainly not anything that anyone in the movie has a grip on. This is a movie that dethrones sexual desire and acts as anything that can be understood...and yet it clearly is in everyone's life. Kubrick's film is a revelation in an overly-sexed world that no matter how hard any of us tries, we cannot know sexuality like we claim. There is an inner universe in Kubrick's film that comes clearly out into the open in the form of smooth tracking shots and lush lighting, colors and staging. Why this film was marketed as a blockbuster just makes me laugh. It is the antithesis of that very notion.
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Summary: Is Tom, Olivier? Nicole, Liv Ullmann?
Review: Why did Kubrick choose Tom and Nicole for the leads? This question is put seriously, and is worthy (I think) of an interesting answer. This film meditates upon sexual desire, trust, fidelity, power, hypocrisy, and here we find an actor and actress, a husband and wife no less, of outstanding commercial success, but whose previous roles had shown them to be performers of limited depth (to be kind) - why pick them? Are they, in their mediocrity of emotion, meant to represent Hollywood in general? Or us, the viewing public, or at least the fragment of our desires which coincides with those portrayed onscreen? Could Kubrick be laughing at Hollywood for its ineffectual and embarassed take on human sexuality? He has taken two performers who are out and out 'stars', possibly the archetypal Hollywood couple of the time, and asked them to reveal their depths - they appear, at least to me, to be floundering about in a wading pool. Tom seems incapable of conveying more than one emotion at a time (and even that one is often unconvincing), and Nicole seems more ready to reveal her body (what there is of it) than her psyche. Kubrick's opus is phenomenal, so he, of all people, must have been aware of his actors' limitations. So what was the point? Is he actually revealing the 'stars' to be very ordinary people, people who have no depths, whose passions are as abstract and empty as the passions which see millions of consumers adulating them as 'stars'? When Tom is asked to witness sex, he wears a mask. Oddly enough, he seems most confident as a screen persona when so adorned. A mask is no liability for Tom: it is more effective at conveying emotion than his naked face. Tom appears embarassed by sex and by emotion - think of the scene with the prostitute, or the fact that drugs are required for 'honest' conversations with Nicole. And are we, while undoubtedly curious, also perhaps a little embarassed at witnessing Nicole nude, at witnessing Tom in close proximity to orgiastic couples? Wouldn't we rather have Nicole wearing a little bit more? Have Tom in less compromising surroundings? Give Kubrick credit - there's a lot more to his films than a spectacularly polished surface; and with this one it's fascinating to speculate what those depths might contain.
Rating: 
Summary: You Are Entering Kubrick Country
Review: ... Do not be alarmed if the things you see and hear bear scant resemblance to other lands, or to life as you know it. You may be concerned that your color rods are freaking out, because the rich spectrum that you are used to is dissolving into a yinyang of orange and blue. You may see groups of people loitering together, in absolute stillness, for hours. You will hear NO overlapping dialogue; let us hope you are cool with this. Five minutes may pass between sentences, or between words in the same sentence. Archetypes (the untutored call them "cliches") out of centuries past will appear from thin air, uttering things like, "Have you ever read Ovid on the Art of Love?" in the tones of an Austrian Elmer Fudd. All of these things--like the expectant, churchly hush--are normal for Kubrick Country. It is a clean, vigilantly ordered land, like Singapore, except frigid and bare. Everything has a denatured smell, even the conversations, which sound as if a brilliant (and very patient) hermit has picked over the words for many years, like Madame Curie sifting through pitchblende ore. Throughout the decades of winnowing, every trace of Life (a messy, unstable element here) has been expunged in a principled quest for the perfect, radiant inner truth. But through some alchemical quirk, instead of luminous radium, the long sublimation has yielded a dull, generic loam, available anywhere. Which may be why it seemed so "true" to the wise hermit. Now, apply this arduous process to everything else: light, color, motion, decor, human interaction. Kubrick Country certainly looks like no other land, which may be its only point: it is difficult to compare it (unfavorably) with others. The ruler of this land was once a very great king. Its valleys were rich, temperate, lovely. The royal consorts were a succession of slim, graceful, hip young beauties, radiant with humor, compassion, intelligence: everything their subjects could want in a Queen. But alas--something happened. No one seems to know quite what. The royal relationships grew more and more protracted and (paradoxically) sour. Perhaps the King should have remained a fleet-footed gadabout. The ninth Queen (nicknamed "the Orange") was a cruel, licentious rakehell, a major embarrassment to the King. So he traded her in for a puckered old bluestocking (with the mannish name "Barry") to whom no breath of scandal would attach. The next Queen (known far and wide as "the Shining One") was a joy: bright, funny, much loved. Sadly, she was deposed by a smirky, meretricious cretin in a chrome jacket, who claimed to be Vietnamese but was no more Asian than Nancy Sinatra in a geisha wig. The late King's many genuflectors take the Maoist view that the Great Leader was by definition infallible, and that each of his wives was equally wonderful. It seems heartless to begrudge them this. Except: rational observers are now whispering that his thirteenth, and final, Queen is by far the ugliest of them all--indeed, one of the nastiest queens of any land, ever. Slow-witted, gauche, incontinent, yet drearily predictable, she moves in an inane coterie of court fools (sporting names like "Cruise Control" and "Kidding Man"), and has zero interest in humanity, beauty, truth or life. Concerned friends of the King even plotted to throttle this gewgaw in her sleep, before she could soil the King's good name; but none could ever tell if her vapid eyes were open or closed. The grimmest part of this debacle may be the fate of the King's last true love. For it is widely held that, just before his death, he had wearied of his sallow, flatulent Queen and hoped to elevate a sweet ingenue (known by the initials A.I.) to her throne. That this was not allowed to happen is cause for great sadness, and suspicion. What next befell A.I. defies description. Deprived of her protector, the child blundered into the sweaty hands of the Evil King: a voracious, manipulative Turk. Cowed by his repeated assertions that his "love is real," she was coldly denuded of all virtue, intelligence, and sanity. Nothing now remains but a lifeless shell. It is said that the Evil King is secretly in cahoots with the satanic Queen--who wore the good King out and hastened his death with her slatternly provocations. This hag is still on the throne, and millions are grieving that their ruler's senile infatuation may have darkened their feelings for him forever. The evil that men do does live after them; particularly such elaborately made evil as this. The question is, what can you, as a visitor, do? ... Peaceful sanctions are your only moral option. You must renounce ALL association with the jejune Queen. You will behave as if she never existed. If others persist in believing in her, you will educate them. You will worship in her place the ideal of A.I. that never came to be--ignoring, for pity's sake, the defiled puppet who now bears that name. Shun the Evil Turk King and all his works. On the day the usurpers' rotten, maggot-filled skulls gawk from flaming pikes above the palace gates, you will not dignify them with a glance.
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